A discussion site for folks interested in improving the quality of medical laboratories. Most will be the thoughts and vents of a long time player in the medical laboratory quality from many perspectives, complex and basic laboratories, developed and developing countries, research and new knowledge.

Featured Post

Healthcare Customer Satisfaction: More Talk AND More Action Customer satisfaction (Voice of the customer) is a recurrent th...

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Planning for Planning.

It has become an absolute truth that if a person,
organization, business or government starts a new initiative without spending
some effective planning time, based largely on measureable evidence, the
initiative will likely fail.The more
time that is put into developing the plan, the greater the likelihood of
success.“Shooting from the hip” is
rarely (if ever) a good idea.

The concept has its origins in the 20th
century literature tied to the thinking and writings of Walter Shewhart, either
in the original (1939) form of Specification – Production – Inspection or the ultimate
adapted form by Deming: Plan – Do – Study
– Act.Reality is that the concept has
its true origins much earlier, perhaps to the early introductions of scientific
method, but for purposes of modern systems, if you haven’t learn from the lessons
of the past 70 years, then adding more historical perspective will contribute
nothing.

The larger question is not so much whether planning is a
good idea, but rather are there tools that can help the Quality Team and the
organization get to the point of a cohesive designed plan.And the answer is yes.Depending on the size of the task, the tools
will vary, although the principles remain the same.

For simple measures like planning for an internal audit
the process can be pretty straight forward. What is our goal, what instruments
do we need to develop.Who will be
involved, who needs to be notified, and can we set a timeline to complete the
task; an all internal operation.

If the goal is to create a new product or service then
having discussions with the “customer” is a good place to start.You likely will want to include the design
people to make sure that the organization has the structured and skilled
where-with-all to achieve what needs to be achieve.If the project is about introducing innovation,
then sort out that it is an innovation that forks are interestedin having.

If everyone is clear on what exactly the end-point is supposed
to look like, then the process to be travelled has a chance of being
accomplished on-time and on-design.

With organizational renewal or restructure, the
introspective approach of a SWOT analysis can be helpful.By collectively putting a critical and
objective eye to an organization’s Strengths and Weaknesses, and Opportunities
and Threats, an approach to maximize the positives and minimize the negatives
can be organized, prioritized, constructed and put into operation.The process may or may not involve the
thoughts, opinions and inputs from folks from outside the operation, but does
need a cold look at objective evidence and the ability to acknowledge weakness.Looking inward will reduce the risk of
starting along a path that does not take appropriate advantage of what exists
or stumbles over what is missing.

Recently I was introduced to a new planning-for-a-plan
tool called a Policy Lens.While new to
me, there is a considerable literature on the concept going back over 40 years.It may well be the instrument of choice for policy
advocates by which I mean folks and organizations that live for the opportunity
to establish policy in large structures such as government, international mega-corporations,
academia, and industry sectors.If you
do an internet scan on “policy lens” or “conceptual scan” you will understand
where this tool gets its most common usage, especially over the last 5 years.

The term “lens” is and example of organizational jargon,
and is probably better replaced by terms such as point-of-view or perspective
or vision.

For establishing as trivial example policy to address the
creating of a webjournal (blog) on laboratory quality management one could look
at the topic from the perspective of (a) writers (b) blog-space providers (c)
quality teams, (d) academics, and (e ) laboratorians.Each group could be asked to consider impacts
on (1) TEEM units (2) credibility (3) risks and liabilities and (4) quality
improvement, plus issues of (i) continual professional development, and
regional autonomy and (ii) international applicability or (iii) short-term or
(iv) long-term application.To the
extent possible, options should be supported by objective measure and
consensus.Each step would needs tools such
as questionnaire designs to be developed.And all this would need to go through the steps of priority and
consensus.

This is obviously not a short term exercise and one would
be strongly cautioned against developing a “lens” infrastructure for a trivial
topic such as blog writing. But it would
certainly be a useful approach for establishing health policy or delivery
systems.Done properly with appropriate validations and
confirmations and broad based objective recordable and measurable inputs, thia
is a major exercise.

Can you go through this whole exercise and still end up
with flawed policy?Of course you can.That is why Planning leads to Doing and then
Studying and then Acting.

But if the policy is big enough or important enough, the
risks associated with under-Planning or non-Planning are guaranteed to be
profound.